Vice ring investigation: Sending a message to S’poreans?

I’m sure many netizens are thinking that the willingness of the police to reveal their investigations into an internet prostitution ring; and the publicity given in the local media to the former school principal, and other professional people who are alleged to use prostitutes is meant to sabo the WP, Yaw and indirectly, the Opposition*.

Here is a more chillingly tot.

As more names come out, many more ordinary S’poreans will realise that the internet is not a “cowboy” town or injun territory where one can get away with anything. It is a place where if the authorities are determined, they can identify users.

Netizens got worked up over the possibility of S’pore imposing stricter rules on the internet (shumething which the US tried, and failed), but which India succeeded in doing. Instead, the government is using the indirect approach. An approch which preys on the fear that many S’poreans have that they will be “fixed” if they are known to be critical of the government or PAP?

What next? A minister suing someone for defamatory comments made on the internet by the latter, comments he tot was “safe” because his identity was “hidden”? You heard it here first.

Finally, netizens should be happy that one Tan Kin Lian never became president. He is an advocate of posters and bloggers registering their monikers using their real names. China has introduced something along similar lines.

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*I’m surprised the SDP has not come up with a rant on this. But then the SDP is rumoured to be as puritanical as the PAP, unlike the WP where sexual acts are accepted as normal, even, it seems, adultery between party members. Maybe, the WP should brand itself as, “The Sexy Party”. Juz joking.

“Anonymous” does not mean anonymous on the internet. Every computer has an unique IP address which can identify you (your computer/tablet/cell phone.) Further your ISP or cell phone provider has access to everything you do on the Internet.

That said, Internet culture is open communications. It is just like a huge coffee shop. It is possible to impose censorship but it is far more difficult to moderate the content. (No one is able to police every message being written on the Internet!) Unless you are extreme, really extreme, no one really cares. You are just a needle in a haystack (or just a “digit.”)

Unless one puts in the effort to hide the trail, internet activity is more traceable than phonecalls. People wants to believe there is internet anonymity, but that has never been a “default” feature of the internet.

Never say on the internet what you will not repeat in public, is my golden rule for the internet.